The present invention relates generally to using social media to estimate interest in media events, and in particular to aggregating social media content items and references to the media events therein for estimating social interest in time-based media.
Online social media services, such as social networking sites, search engines, news aggregators, blogs, and the like provide a rich environment for users to comment on events of interest and communicate with other users. Content items contributed by users of these social media services often include references to events that appear in time based media such as television shows, news reports, sporting events, movies, concert performances, and the like. However, although the content items refer to the time-based media, the social media content items themselves typically are isolated from the events and time-based media in which those events occur.